About a year ago, I saw Omaha-based Bright Eyes perform at the Pearl Street Ballroom in Northampton. The third time I had seen him since the release of 2002's monolithic Lifted or the Story's in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, the show found Conor Oberst-the indie-folk ensemble's mastermind and sole permanent member-largely performing solo. Of the several then-unheard songs from I'm Wide Awake It's Morning played that night, the highlight was "Lua," a hushed-as-breath and bare-as-bones slice of familiar, storyteller folk that seemed uniquely urgent, silencing the crowd even as Oberst's narration rarely rose above a whisper.

When the oft-indulgent Lifted blindsided mainstream critics three years ago-resulting in many critics' hastiness to proclaim Oberst "the next Bob Dylan"-Oberst's own reaction seemed antithetical. As he began to premiere new material, a maturation of style soon became obvious.

Where he once sang through painfully grating warbles, a newfound vocal reservation seemed to compliment his increasingly identifiable mode of storytelling, and his newest songs wisely placed an emphasis on the acoustic guitar and pedal steel. In short, it was clear that Oberst was traditionalizing his songcraft with an effortlessness previously unseen in the young Mid-westerner.

In that sense, I'm Wide Awake It's Morning simply seems natural; this is Bright Eyes doing what it does best, at times better than ever before. Not reminiscent of Bob Dylan, but rather of The Byrds' country-rock masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo, I'm Wide Awake is a collection of reserved yet uniquely immediate alt-country narratives.

In the album opener "At the Bottom of Everything," Oberst comforts a fellow passenger as their plane plummets towards the sea: "While my mother waters plants, my father loads his guns/He says death will give us back to God just like this setting sun/Is returned to this lonesome ocean."

A gratuitous concept, for sure, but Oberst's tales have always defied convention. His rapidly strummed guitar complimented by a light mandolin, Oberst is joined by My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James in the song's chorus. There they finally conclude, as though waking up from some jarring daydream, "The city buses are swimming past/I'm happy just because/I found out I'm really no one."

In "Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)," Oberst recalls last year's anti war protests in New York City singing, "And there were barricades to keep us off the street/But the crowd kept pushing forward until they swallowed the police." Country-rock iconoclast Emmylou Harris' ghostly harmonies soon join him in a simple chorus of "Yeah, they went wild," before those same lines are enveloped in a choir of reverb-laden pianos, echoing pedal steels and a single, resounding trumpet.

While characterized by a singular, reflective loneliness, I'm Wide Awake seems uniquely refined. Four years ago, songs like "Something Vague" and "The Calendar Hung Itself" had fans questioning Oberst's mental health. But now, gone is the self-mythologizing, nightmarish imagery and overt self-pity.

As the album draws to a close with the climactic "Road to Joy," Oberst seems to exult in self-awareness.

After ruminating over his own psyche, his place in the world and the events that affect it, he seems content realizing that-after all these years-maybe he was ruminating a bit too hard. "The sun came up with no conclusions/flowers sleeping in their beds/the city cemetery's humming/I'm wide awake it's morning," he acknowledges, before simply concluding, "boys, make some noise!" as his voice is lost beneath a wall of wailing horns, crashing drums and ringing guitars. A lone indulgence, perhaps, from Bright Eyes' most deceivingly simple, mature and inescapably triumphant incarnation yet.

I'm Wide Awake It's Morning is a mature, charming and deliberative exercise in trad-folk, its nimbleness painting a subtly beautiful framework for Oberst's finest storytelling compositions.